Imagine covering the distance from New York to Tokyo in just over a minute while plunging into a 2,500-degree Fahrenheit environment. This episode tells the story of NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the fastest human-made object ever built and the first spacecraft to enter the atmosphere of a star. We trace the mission back to a 1958 proposal, the abandoned plan to use a Jupiter slingshot and nuclear power, the cancellation in the early 2000s, and the redesign around seven Venus flybys that brought the cost to about 1.5 billion dollars and made the 2018 launch possible.

We explain why Eugene Parker's 1958 solar wind theory was initially rejected and how the probe came to be the first NASA spacecraft named for a living person. Then we get into the engineering: the carbon-carbon heat shield with a 97 percent empty foam core, solar limb sensors and  ...